“So what made you choose the arcane path in the first place? Most potential [Mages] get drawn in by the flashy nature of fire or frost.”

  “It’s true,” Ellesea laughed. “I very nearly became a fire [Mage] myself. But something really called to me in the arcane branch. And I’ve found that there’s something beautiful in it, even if most people can’t see the spell work as it forms.”

  “True,” Melia readily agreed. She was all about arcane over the other branches. “And in my opinion, there’s tactical advantages to a much subtler, subdued magic.”

  The rest of the party nodded absentmindedly, having listened in to the start of the conversation, having nothing better to do.

  It was hard to disguise a pillar of fire called down from the sky, or giant fractals of ice growing across the ground like a shattering pane of glass. Most arcane magics left no visible trace while traveling and sometimes didn’t even on impact. There was usually a bit of a show surrounding the [Mage]’s hands when casting, but they were mostly far enough away or hidden at the start that any potential enemies were caught unaware. Sometimes, that extra time without drawing aggro was enough to give a [Mage] a second shot without being countered, which was a huge bonus.

  “And there’s so many crossover applications in other branches of magic,” Ellesea sighed, excited to finally have somebody to talk to about her magic. The rest of the team couldn’t keep up and were easily bored. She guessed Melia had more than enough exposure to different magic branches with her level, and even if she didn’t, she was a new, fresh, captive audience.

  “Are you thinking about creating a hybrid build?” Melia asked. Back when the game was a simple matter of choosing talents to go with her class, options were limited and there were very few viable builds at the top end of the competitive scene. Melia never actually cared about that, but she was never competing to be the best among the player base.

  “No,” Ellesea shook her head. “Not for combat at least. I was thinking more about branching into [Enchanting] at some point, or maybe researching temporal or spatial magics.”

  “Those are tricky,” Melia found herself saying. At least it explained the hexagonal lattice base. Good for enchanting or creating simple magic tools.

  Despite not being an academy trained [Mage], or even having magic at all in her last life, this body had an instinctive understanding of all the magics she mastered in the game. That included being a max level [Enchanter] and arcane [Mage]. Plus there were always side quests with stories where some mortal delved too deep into the forbidden side of such magics, trying to tear holes into reality and generally making a horrible mess out of their own lives and everything else for miles around them.

  Time, especially, was not something to mess with lightly. It had a habit of marching forward inexorably, uncaring for what other people thought about it, rewarding those who tried tampering with it in the most twisted of “monkey paw wish” ways.

  “Are you familiar with [Enchanting]?” Ellesea asked. Part of her was resigned to the inevitable “yes” that she was starting to associate with the overpowered gnome. Being a maybe-a-dragon and definitely over rank 10 adventurer was something of a cheat, and only the bizarre quirk Melia had of being humble (not something dragons were), kept Ellesea from melting in envy.

  “Yes!” Melia chirped. “I’d like to think I’m something of a skilled [Enchantress].”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. That meant, of course, that the silly gnome was probably a ridiculous level, not that she’d tell them what it was either. At this point Jessica wouldn’t be surprised if she claimed she was a Grandmaster.

  But Melia was content to leave it at that. She was much more interested in seeing a real live arcane [Mage] in action! She had yet to bring out any of her [Mage] spells and she was afraid of embarrassing herself.

  “What’s your standard rotation?” Melia asked. The others stared at her blankly, and for a moment she thought her game lingo didn’t translate into something this world would understand. “If you don’t mind sharing, that is.”

  “I mean, you just hit whatever you’re aiming at with your strongest stuff,” Jessica laughed. In most cases, with anything they would hunt at least, it was usually over after the first volley.

  “Okay, sure,” Melia laughed, “But what if you’re going up against something much stronger?”

  “I guess it depends,” Ellesea said thoughtfully. “Are there many monsters or just one big one?”

  “Let’s go with a single big guy.”

  “Then I suppose that’s easy. Right before we engage, I’d probably use [Evocation], [Timewarp], and as soon as somebody else has its attention, I’d unleash an [Arcane Surge]. Then I’d probably use [Touch of the Magi] and send out an [Arcane Barrage], maybe an [Arcane Orb], and then start stacking some [Arcane Blasts] while I wait for those to cool down.”

  Ellesea didn’t expect the gnome to follow any of that. It was one thing for somebody to feign polite interest in somebody else’s class, but it was another thing entirely to get into a deep conversation about the nitty gritty details of adventuring. The gnome looked confused, and Ellesea was just about to apologize for dumping a bunch of unexplained terminology on her, though she did ask for it. And then Melia opened her mouth.

  “[Arcane Blast] so late?” she muttered to herself, probably forgetting the rest of the group were present. “But why not…oh!”

  It was then that Melia remembered how much her beloved [Mage] class changed after she stopped playing it. She went back to it on rare occasions, when the fit took her, and every time she did she was overwhelmed by the differences.

  Now that Ellesea had mentioned it, Melia did remember that the basic rotation changed drastically since the second expansion. [Evocation] used to be an ender, used after all the cooldowns had been spent and she ran out of mana, designed to quickly get her mana bar back up from empty. She couldn’t think of the latest patch notes, but she did remember that it got reworked enough to be used at the very beginning of the fight.

  She was used to spamming [Arcane Blast] over and over, watching it go faster and faster as it stacked a haste buff, but it would empty her mana bar in a matter of a dozen casts if she didn’t clear it out first.

  A spark in the back of her mind was telling her the spell worked in reality the way she thought it did, but she didn’t think Ellesea would lie to her. Not about magic, which the girl was clearly in love with.

  “Hey, can you do me a favor?” Melia asked suddenly. Ellesea smiled, prepared to indulge the small gnome. “Show me your [Arcane Blast]. Not, like, attacking anything, let’s see…just, how about that rock?”

  Ellesea obliged, and took up her stance. It was a good stance, in Melia’s untrained opinion: feet at shoulder width, leading with her dominant side, both arms raised, face squarely locked onto her target. She began speaking a strange language, which Melia’s brain told her was the language of magic, speaking words of power into existence, guiding the mana inside her to create her heart’s desire.

  In this case, an [Arcane Blast].

  Melia listened in fascination as her brain supplied the meaning of the words: focus, attack, amplify, enhance. She gathered that those were the runes that formed the spell itself, and she watched as mana streams, invisible to the naked eye but clear with her mana sight, created the spell. Once the final word was spoken, the spell formed, and several seconds later, it disappeared from around Ellesea’s hands and instantly assaulted the rock, which had a large chunk gouged out.

  Melia clapped excitedly. It was her first encounter with magic! Well, what she called magic, thanks to her familiarity with the game. She had seen plenty of other examples of magics, and made much of it herself, but nothing from her old favorite, the [Mage] class.

  She glanced back at Ellesea after she got her fill of staring at the boulder, watching with wonder as the remnants of the spell formed the lingering effect of the buff that came along with casting [Arcane Blast], and was quickly absorbed into the [Mage], where it would persist for several moments waiting for her to either use it or lose it.

  It wasn’t the [Arcane Blast] she was intimately familiar with, but at the same time, she felt like it was, at its core, the same. As if this world had followed along with the game’s development and the spell changed with it. But that made Melia think.

  This was real life. There were no hotfixes with patch notes for balance. Melia was fascinated to see how changes to spells somehow naturally mirrored the changes made in game, but she was curious if that meant the spells couldn’t be “downgraded” or “reverted” to previous states. Her intuition told her that she could cast her spells exactly as she remembered, which would have been the [Arcane Blast] of many, many years ago, not the evolution that had been present when she last played.

  Melia focused on a boulder next to the one Ellesea had pulverized and, on a whim, queued up her own [Arcane Blast]. She was just satisfying her own curiosity, so she didn’t think to make it more visible for anyone else or reduce its power at all. She summoned up the power from the heart on the right side of her chest, a magical organ native to dragons. With a lazy flick of her wrist, brilliantly white sparkles spiraled up her fingers as power gathered and the spell formed. Over two seconds, the lights condensed and focused into a single, radiant point, before winking out of existence and instantly reforming into a magical slash that cut directly through the stone across from her.

  As a result, only Ellesea truly saw what happened during the cast, while the others simply saw the immediate destruction of a solid rock.

  “Jeez! Warn a girl!” Jessica cried out, throwing her hands over her head to protect herself from a sudden barrage of flying shards of rock.

  “How…how did you do that?” Ellesea gasped, spellbound and staring at the lingering afterimage the spell left behind before fading from her magical senses.

  “Hm?” Melia tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  To her it was a simple spell, her body’s muscle memory making the action nearly as simple as clicking a button on a quick cast hotbar.

  To Ellesea, the spell formation was nearly instantaneous, with no wasted movement to create or define the spell, no extra bloat in the construct to slow down the activation, beautifully refined and somehow both aggravatingly simple yet maddeningly complex. It was like watching an artist paint a masterpiece on the side, all while casually reading the morning newspaper.

  Ellesea was very familiar with the concept of silent casting. It was the ultimate expression of a spell’s mastery, when the [Mage] no longer had to devote any focus on willing the magic to bend to their whims with the power of their voice.

  Ellesea was also used to seeing high level [Mages] cast spells quicker than students. That was a given, as one dedicated their life to the pursuit of an art, it made sense that they would get more skilled at it.

  But there was a defined amount of time that it took spells to form, presumably determined by the system itself, or else more likely it was simply ingrained in the nature of magic itself. A spell, even after it was correctly formed and willed into existence, needed time to solidify in the real, corporeal world, and cast.

  It was called a “cast time”, and there were very few ways to reduce it past the “base” limit. Entire schools of magic were devoted to the study and documentation of known spell formations and cast times. For example, the simple [Arcane Blast] they had both cast was known to be a 2.5 second cast. Most of the professors who specialized in the arcane branch could cast it under 3 seconds, but Ellesea had never heard of anybody actually casting it at the base limit of 2.5, not in recent memory. If anybody at the academy could do it, it would have to be the Headmaster.

  “I…might not be the best at explaining,” Melia admitted, but she focused on a spot slightly above where the boulder had just been. One of the more novel aspects of casting magic in real life was that not all spells required a target. She could cast it into the air where, unlike a fireball flung into the sky, it would harmlessly dissipate. Though to be fair, the fireball would eventually die off, too, if it didn’t hit anything first.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The whole group turned to watch Melia studiously as she once again readied her spell, waved her hand and flicked her wrist, and blasted empty air.

  This time, however, she made sure to be extra obvious with her intent, though she didn’t think to actually slow down her casting speed at all. In fact, she was under the spell’s buff, which for her version reduced the casting time of all arcane spells, instead of ramping the power up. As such, the spell cast a little bit quicker, shaving it down to 2 seconds even.

  Ellesea stared in slack jawed disbelief, and the others, though none of them knew exactly what happened, understood that something had.

  “That’s…not right,” Ellesea complained. “How did you do that?”

  “Eh? It’s just [Arcane Blast]. You cast it yourself. See? [Arcane Blast]!”

  Again Melia targeted the empty space over the boulder and let loose her spell. The buff, now at two stacks, pushed her haste up another bit and the spell came out a fraction over one and a half seconds.

  “See? See!” Ellesea repeated excitedly, waving her hands in the direction where the aftereffects of the blast were fading. “It went faster! How did you push past the base cooldown of the spell?”

  If it was possible to shorten activation times…that changed everything Ellesea had ever known about spellcasting.

  One of the biggest drawbacks of being a [Mage], outside of being very squishy with low health, strength, and usually wearing cloth armor, was the fact that their spells took so long to cast.

  [Mages] made excellent artillery, ambush strikers, or otherwise powerful back line support. Very few magic users could cast their spells while moving, rooting them in place. If they didn’t kill whatever they aimed at in one shot, without dedicated protection, they did not usually get a second.

  It would have been one thing if the gnome had used some sort of haste amplifier first, but to her knowledge, she had not.

  “Oh? Oh! That’s the primary effect of [Arcane Blast]…at least, that’s how it was when I was learning it. Let me guess, yours is different? It makes every subsequent cast of [Arcane Blast] more expensive, but ramps up your damage?”

  Ellesea nodded numbly. She never heard of the essential arcane spell doing anything other than ramping damage. She could reliably cast it four times before she needed to dump the buff by casting something else, like [Arcane Barrage] or [Arcane Explosion]. A memory from one of her earlier history of magic classes tickled her, reminding her that it was possible that spells changed over time. If enough dedicated masters led their apprentices in a certain direction, eventually enough could change about a spell to alter it at a fundamental level.

  She never thought she’d ever see an example of that in real life.

  “And…yours?” Ellesea asked, a bit overwhelmed. “What does yours do?”

  Melia screwed up her face, likely looking into her system Spellbook instead of summoning it in person. She must have found what she was looking for, because she let out a happy little squeal.

  “Here we go! Ahem. [Arcane Blast]…with each subsequent cast of [Arcane Blast], amplify spell haste by 1.2 times, increase cost by 200 percent. It stacks infinitely, so if you have the mana for it, you can reach some ridiculous speeds.”

  Forget speeds, this gnome was ridiculous. Ellesea sat down quickly before her legs failed her. Her mind was reeling with new information, ideas of seemingly limitless potential if she could harness that sort of modification to her own spells. Even if it was only changing the one spell from her current state to how it apparently was during the Age of Upheaval, that would open avenues to her that no one else had.

  Ellesea wondered what the chances were Melia could teach her the altered or original spell. Most high level [Mages] guarded their custom spells jealously, keeping every minor advantage to themselves, sometimes not even passing everything on to their own disciples. Melia was certainly high level, most likely that applied to her [Mage] class too. She would probably be rejected, but there was no harm in asking.

  “Can you teach me that version of [Arcane Blast]?"

  Ellesea tried to sound as nonchalant and casual as possible, she didn’t want to seem like she was begging. She also didn’t want to get her hopes up, only to have them crushed.

  “I can try,” Melia instantly agreed, to everybody’s shock. “Though I’ll admit I’m probably not a good teacher. I never went to any schools like you do.”

  “But…your level….” Ellesea found herself stammering out, the most recent revelation stunning her. She obviously knew it was possible to level a class without formal education, but to see someone succeed without it was very rare. Unless the gnome’s levels in [Mage] weren’t high at all? The whole party assumed that since Melia was at least rank 10, all of her class levels were very high, but that wasn’t a guarantee. Maybe she picked it up on a whim and didn’t do anything with it?

  Melia seemed to understand what Ellesea was getting at, and for a brief moment looked affronted. The emotion quickly passed, followed by something more contemplative.

  “Oh, I’m very high level,” she eventually said, sounding a bit self-deprecating. Ellesea didn’t know why, any sort of level was something to celebrate. Melia hesitated, staring at each of her companions, before coming to a conclusion.

  “I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you now,” she nodded to herself, firming her resolve. “But I am an [Archmage]. I’ve got a title from the system and everything.”

  She switched it over on her status page, just as each of her teammates instinctively cast [Inspect].

  Sure enough, she was no longer “Melia the Magnificent”.

  Now she was “Archmage Melia”.

  Ellesea couldn’t take it any more and passed out.

  “Oh shoot, I didn’t kill her, did I?!” Melia scrambled over to the fainted [Mage], relieved to hear her heart beating in her chest. She supposed the shock of seeing somebody with a system given title was a bit too much, so she switched it back to what it was before. As corny and dumb as it was, “-the Magnificent" was growing on her.

  Alastair stepped in and laid his hands on Ellesea’s shoulders, the light of healing infusing her. Her breathing steadied, but she remained asleep.

  “She’s fine,” Alastair said, turning to face the rest.

  “I’m not,” Jessica immediately grumped. She was staring down at the gnome and she wouldn’t look away. Something told Melia this was different from all the other times she’d sprung something outrageous on her new friends. She’d crossed a line, and now she needed to answer for her crimes.

  “What?” Melia tried sounding innocent, but she knew they’d see right through her.

  “Don’t give me that,” Jessica hissed. “Don’t give me ‘what’, miss Archmage.”

  “Fine,” Melia sighed dramatically. “But I’m being serious. What did I do to piss you off this time?”

  “Oh, only hiding the fact that you’re a system titled Archmage! I don’t think you needed to make as big a stink over hiding your class as you did, but I can sort of see why you would. You nearly gave me a heart attack! Do you have any idea how rare it is for the system to grant titles for class mastery? It happens like, once a century at most!”

  “Ah,” Melia nodded. “But, again, I think you’re misunderstanding. I have levels in [Mage], but-”

  “Don’t,” Jessica said sharply. “Don’t try that ‘but it’s not my class’ nonsense. You literally just showed us your title! It’s from the system! You can’t fake that!”

  “But-”

  “What did I just say? Why lie about it? Actually, this is all wrong! Normally people lie about stuff like being an Archmage or Grand Paladin or Beastmaster or whatever class they are, and they don’t have anything to back them up! You’ve got the damn title and now you’re trying to deny it? I don’t get it! Why are you lying to us?”

  “Jessica,” Melia said sternly, causing the [Hunter] to jolt. “I have never lied to you. Not once, not since the very first time we met.”

  Jessica looked fed up, but Melia held up her hand.

  “Think about that slowly for a minute, Jessica. Think about what that really means.”

  Jessica stared at Melia strangely for a moment as the gears in her brain started turning. Various conversations started replaying in her mind, where the silly gnome spouted grand boasts and claims…before following through with each and every one of them…with her abundance of classes….

  Jessica’s eyes slowly widened, slowly surpassing the size of dinner plates.

  “B-but…you…dragon…not….”

  “Haven’t lied,” Melia simply repeated stubbornly. “And please believe me when I say, knowing what I actually am is a bigger shock than you realize. I’m not a [Mage]. Once upon a time I was. Not anymore. Do you really think I would be ashamed of my class if it was something as mundane as an [Archmage]?”

  Jessica sat down, feeling dizzy. Nothing about any manner of [Archmage] was mundane, system granted or not. People dedicated their lives to the pursuit of such lofty goals, usually the triumph of multiple decades. And wasn’t this gnome claiming to be 25?

  She looked at the tiny gnome in a new light. If she was telling the truth this whole time…and she really did know other dragons…she might just be one herself…

  “And you,” Melia turned to Y’cennia, no longer high from the euphoria of leveling, went back to being subdued the whole time the two [Mages], or rather the [Mage] and [Not-A-Mage] did their thing. “You’re worried that I’m going to replace somebody, aren’t you?”

  Y’cennia, despite every ounce of willpower trying to prevent it, nodded once.

  “Well I’m not,” Melia threw up her hands. “I’m not lying about that either. Think about it. You all seem to think that I’m rank 10.”

  Jessica distinctly noticed the tone Melia used, telling her how wrong they likely were about the gnome’s true level.

  “If I was, why would I bother replacing one of you?”

  They blinked, and as a group came to a horrible, gut wrenching conclusion. Melia was right. She didn't need to replace any of them, she didn’t need any of them. And to make matters worse, she spelled it out loud for them, to their faces.

  “I don’t need you. Not for your classes. I need you for other reasons, which I’ve repeated time and time again. I want you for who you are, not what you bring.”

  She stared straight at Y’cennia and pointed directly at her face.

  “I don’t need an [Alchemist].”

  She reached into her inventory and drew out a potion. Y’cennia instinctively cast [Identify], and the gnome let the orange rarity potion linger long enough for her to get a brief description before she stashed it in her inventory. Y’cennia felt sick.

  [Bottomless Draught of Regenerative Healing]

  Quality: 5 stars

  Level:???

  Rarity: Legendary

  Instantly restores 50% health, and restores another 50% health over the next 30 seconds. 2 charges, 10 minute cooldown per charge.

  Yo dawg, we heard you like memes, so we put a potion in your potion so you can heal while you heal.

  Crafted By: Melia

  Y’cennia didn’t understand the flavor text, but that wasn’t anything too new. Sometimes the system had a sense of humor that defied all logic. What she did understand was how outclassed she was in her own profession.

  Bottomless potions, potions that refilled themselves magically and never ran out, were a thing of myth.

  She had never heard of anyone making a legendary healing potion, and she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it, maybe her eyes were lying to her.

  Melia quickly turned to Jessica.

  “I don’t need a [Hunter],”

  The group could already guess what was about to come, and their fears were proven correct as Melia reached into her inventory and pulled out a…bow.

  If what defined a “bow” was merely “an object that launches arrows”.

  It was tiny, to match the tiny gnome’s tiny frame. If Jessica was to hold it in her hands, it would be smaller than a child’s toy. The string itself was not even two feet long, closer to one and a half, only three quarters of the gnome’s height. But she could see how deadly it was.

  [Skyfury, the Celestial Legionnaire]

  Level: ???

  Rarity: Legendary

  Dexterity:???

  Stamina:???

  Critical Strike:???

  Equip: Summon an astral arrow on draw, without the need for a quiver. Max limit for arrows (none).

  My arrows will blot out the sun.

  Jessica went mute as the gnome stashed away that godlike weapon as if it were some common collectible to be brought out when she fancied toying with a trinket. Not that she would be able to use it, but just looking at what stats she could see told her that the bow alone would make her near invincible. She would effectively double her rank instantly, possibly triple.

  And then, because of course she would, but to everybody’s surprise, she turned to Alastair and pointed at him too.

  “I don’t need a [Paladin].”

  Unlike for the first two girls, she didn’t pull anything from her inventory. Instead, she did something far scarier. She cast a spell.

  “[Hallowed Ground].”

  It wasn’t a spell Jessica was familiar with, but by the way Alastair’s eyes widened, he was. And it wasn’t something he had expected to see, either.

  A bright ring of light encircled Melia briefly, quickly fading away, but leaving her coated in a golden, semi-translucent film. She pulled out one of her daggers, which she hadn’t used since their first foray into hunting wolves, and raised it in the air dramatically. She quickly slashed it down on her own wrist, making Alastair cry out, but the expected shower of blood didn’t come. She didn’t cut off her own hand, nor did it get the faintest scratch. Melia put the dagger away, her eyes never wavering as she continued to stare at Alastair. After a total of 10 seconds, the light faded, leaving the gnome as she normally was.

  “No,” she said at last, sounding old and very tired. “I don’t need anything you could possibly bring. Not by conventional standards. But for one day, for one night, can we forget all that?”

  She looked up at each of them, beseechingly, imploringly.

  “For one night, can’t we just be a group of friends about to enjoy some dinner?”

  Despite everything inside Jessica screaming out in protest, no words came out. Instead, she found herself nodding in agreement.